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11 Oct 2008 / 12 Tishri 5769     

About Us

The History and Ethos of BRS

Legal Information:

Bromley & District Reform Synagogue Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee, Registered in England and Wales no. 4583645. Registered Charity no. 1098431, and a constituent of The Movement for Reform Judaism.

  

Bromley Reform Synagogue has been established in the borough for over 43 years, 41 of them at the present site, which was converted for the purpose by members themselves, and has recently been substantially refurbished, again through the efforts of members.

The ethos of self-help and inclusivity persists to this day. Members of both sexes and every age, background and ability are involved - and invited to become involved, whatever their previous experience or lack of it - in all aspects of synagogue life, from administration and maintaining the fabric of the building to reading from Torah and everything in between, supporting and supported by the only full time employee - the Rabbi - and other staff such as the administrator, the cheder (religion school) head teacher and the caretaker. This leads to the very welcoming and supportive atmosphere that is often remarked on by visitors and new members.

All sorts of people are involved in our community: born Jews with a great deal of knowledge or none at all; people considering conversion or actively engaged in study for conversion; families of which part is Jewish and part not; those who practise other religions, but who enjoy joining us from time to time; people seeking their roots; those who have lost contact with their Judaism and are looking for a way back, perhaps by attending services for specific occasions, such as the Seder; and the many who lack the confidence to join in at first because they believe that "everybody else knows it all". They are always surprised at how much they have to contribute. 

The best illustration of just how much is contributed by how many is the Chairman's report delivered in March 2008, which covers every aspect of community life.  An edited version appears at the end of this page.

We place great emphasis on all three traditional roles of a synagogue - house of study, house of prayer and house of meeting, and each of those categories covers a wide range of activity and endeavour. "Study" - for adults and children alike - might mean one-to-one teaching, a lecture or an activity associated with a festival; "prayer" covers not only formal services on Shabbat and festivals but such things as Chanukah candle-lighting parties in members' homes; and "meeting" extends beyond centralised social events to all types of formal and informal support from both the Rabbi and individual members.

There are more details of all our activities in the relevant parts of this website, but if you have a particular question that does not seem to be covered, please contact the Administrator or the Rabbi via "contact us".



ETHOS

The synagogue is a constituent of the Movement for Reform Judaism, MRJ, which you can visit direct at www.reformjudaism.org.uk, to discover more about all aspects of reform Judaism and its values.

The following report will tell you all about what that means in practice on the ground in Bromley.  For a slightly more philosophical angle - but only slightly more, because, as you will see, he is the first to remind us that belonging to a Jewish community is, above all, about what happens in practice - you are warmly encouraged to look at the Rabbi's reflections, which follow it.


Edited highlights of the Chairman's Report
presented at the Synagogue AGM, 18 March 2008

The past year has been extremely active.  There is hardly a day when the shul is not buzzing with people, and I know that there are also many meetings and activities going on in members’ homes.  What is pleasing is that such a high proportion of our membership is involved in the shul and in such a variety of activities.  What follows is a very brief summary of some of the main areas.  There are, of course, many others.

The Synagogue Board

Major decisions taken by the Board during the past year have included:
·    to spend funds on landscaping the exterior of the synagogue buildings and doing maintenance, repairs and decorating of the exterior of the old synagogue building; 
·    to support youth by funding their first attendance of an RSY summer camp with bursaries from the Donor Trust;
·    to recognise the important contribution that many non-Jewish partners of members make to the community by instituting the position of ‘Associate of Bromley Synagogue’ for those who desire it; and
·    to purchase of ‘fair trade’ goods wherever possible.

Education

The Education Committee has most ably organised a stream of events.  Lecture topics included:
·         Leo Baeck;
·         Jews and Muslims through the ages; and
·        the origins of Progressive Judaism and its relationship to the Enlightenment, given as a series of lectures by Rabbi Tony Hammond.

There were also a number of other talks including one from Bromley Women’s Aid and another from ‘Jewish Renaissance’.

At the beginning of the year, the Board expressed a strong desire to strengthen consciousness and knowledge about Israel.  The Education Committee responded by organising an excellent programme of events to run throughout the year of ’Israel at 60’.  So far these have comprised:
·         a lecture on and the peace process by Professor David Newman
·         a series of talks on and Zionism with Rabbi Tony Hammond
·         a talk given by David Jacobs of the MRJ about his family’s involvement with mandated Palestine .
Coming soon is a discussion entitled ‘Israel and me’ and the Jubilee lecture on ‘ and the Middle East ’ with more to follow.

There have been two classes of GCSE Hebrew studies for adults meeting each week throughout the year with 8-10 students each, some of whom will be taking the examination in May/June.  Since last autumn there has also been a modern Hebrew class for adults.

Other activities organised by the Education Committee have included
·         a Yom Ha’atzmaut family event;
·         a  Chanukah concert by our talented young musicians;
·         a film Society showing Israeli and other films.

Turning to the youngsters, the Cheder continues to thrive under the skillful and energetic leadership of its headteacher.  The Gan Yeladim (pre-cheder group) has been extremely successful and, with a bit of luck, will ensure a healthy future for the cheder classes that follow, as the children move on up.  In the Cheder, the children learn their Judaism, thanks not only to our dedicated teachers, but also to the post-Bar Mitzvah youth who participate as helpers, contributing so much and of course, learning as they teach.   In addition some of them have been attending a GCSE class after Cheder on Sundays and will be sitting the exam.  I am really pleased to say that, thanks to the enthusiasm their leader, some of the post-Bar Mitzvah youngsters also now meet regularly as a youth group.

Family services remain popular for children and their parents and attendance at the Yom Hashoah service by adults as well as the children of the cheder continues to increase each year.  The siddur compiled for the Yom Hashoah service is outstanding and we are taking steps to encourage other synagogues to adopt it.

Our educational activities are not limited to this community.  Every week there are visits from schools in the district, whose children and teachers learn about Judaism and Jewish practice.

With all that is apparent with respect to education because it is going on in front of us in the shul, we mustn’t forget that there is continuing education going on quietly in the background in people’s homes, including the Learning Partnership of one-to-one teaching of Hebrew and the teaching of adults and children studying for Bar and Bat Mitzvah.  Many of the teachers have been doing this for years for nothing but their love of Judaism and their wish to pass it on.

Finally, I must mention the important educational work carried out on behalf of the Jewish Community by our representative on the Standing Advisory Committee on Religious Education (SACRE) for the Bromley Education Authority.   

Caring Community 

The dedication of this committee is outstanding and its work, with that of the many other carers, is quite remarkable.  This is a dimension of the synagogue’s activities which often goes unrecognised but the support that is given in all sorts of ways to members who are sick, disabled, suffering the consequences of old age, bereaved or simply lonely, is truly wonderful.  The committee keeps in touch with members by telephone and visits, be they at home, in hospital or in residential/nursing care.  Currently there are 24 members/families needing varying levels of support with whom they are in contact on a regular basis. The Rabbi has contributed enormously to this work through his pastoral care, which is greatly appreciated.

Carers and others are given frequent updates by telephone, e-mail or face-to-face.  Confidentiality is maintained as far as possible and the approach is remarkably professional for what is an amateur organisation.    The committee has recently developed a large print ‘Change of Circumstances’ card which gives contact telephone numbers for the Synagogue, Rabbi and Caring Community committee.

In addition to the individual care, birthday cards are sent to members who reach 80 years of age and over and all the senior members receive Rosh Hashana cards, often made by children in Cheder.  This year cards will be sent by our Cheder children for Pesach to those of our community who are in residential care homes.

There is an arrangement for lifts to Shul for those in need. Beckenham, Bromley, Orpington and Blackheath are covered by members who are prepared to offer car transport.  More volunteer drivers are sought.

The Committee has important relationships with Nightingale House both directly and through the South London Forum, Jewish Care, Bromley Links and Age Concern.

Our thanks go to all the unsung heroes quietly getting on with the work of a caring Jewish community.

The Social Centre

If you have the time to pop into the shul on a Wednesday, you will find a thriving social centre.  Every fortnight, it meets for friendly chatter and games, exercises, lunch, a lecture and entertainment.  The atmosphere is warm and hospitable and despite illness and the death of some members, the numbers attending the social centre have grown to more than 30 each meeting.  During the past year there has been a visit to Nightingale House which included lunch followed by an entertainment, lunch at a local garden centre and a summer party.  Our thanks go to the members of the dedicated team that makes it all happen.

Religion & Ritual

Thanks to the careful stewardship and the dedication of the wardens, services have run smoothly throughout the year.  The High Holydays are always demanding but lay readers, mitzvot, moving and setting up at the Crofton Halls and every aspect of these festivals went as desired.  Many members commented on how meaningful they found the Rabbi’s sermons.  We were also grateful for home hospitality in the afternoon of Rosh Hashana.

The Civic Service, which took place in November with the Mayor of Bromley and other dignitaries present, was particularly significant both for the members present and our visitors.

Other highlights have included:

·        the Yom Hashoah service;
·        the Communal Seder;
·        the Selichot service before Rosh Hashanah;
·        the evening service of Sukkot;
·        a Friday night service taken by the RSY netzer group;
·        a creative service by MRJ shlicha;
·        the Nightingale House shabbaton;
·        the vice presidents’ Kiddush;
·        home candle-lightings for Chanukah with large numbers attending, and
·        a number of memorial plaque dedication ceremonies.

Our thanks go to the choir, who provide music for all our services.  We are indeed very fortunate to have such a conscientious group of talented members to lead us in singing, which plays such an important part of our worship.  We are also pleased to have a new organ, which was paid for by a generous donation.

Finally, we thank the Rabbi, who has led excellent Shabbat and festival services throughout the year, giving sermons and drashot, which are always thought provoking and often inspiring.

Housing

Various pictures were put up, blinds were fitted to the windows inside the sanctuary and the Norwood plaques [Ten Commandments and Prayer for the Royal Family] were rehung.  Many new plaques have been fitted to the memorial wall. The stained glass windows on the street side of the sanctuary were renovated and the CST paid for fitting of protective film to windows throughout the building and fitting of new clear safety glazing to several windows in the Functions Room. Work has also been done on the roof, and new access doors to the patio area have been fitted to coincide with the completion of the landscaping work.  Our thanks go to all who have supervised and helped with the works, and to our new and retiring health and safety officers.

Interfaith work

In a relatively small Jewish community such as Bromley, there is always the risk that we put all our energies into maintaining own Jewish identity to the detriment of working with those of other faiths.  I am therefore particularly grateful to those who work so hard to keep us involved in the Three Faiths Forum and the Council of Christians and Jews. 

Membership

I would like to thank the membership development group for all the effort that it puts in to bringing new members into the synagogue.  Our numbers have remained pretty constant which, in light of the trend to assimilation and the inevitable passing of elderly members as well as people moving out of the area, is a remarkable achievement. 

Communications

The Comms Group was established to co-ordinate our internal and external communications.  The excellent Website has been up and running for some time and appears to be useful in helping people to find us e-Light is a most effective means of ready communication and of course there is Highlight produced with exceptional diligence and creativity by our longstanding and dedicated editor.

Finally

We are grateful to so many other members of the synagogue who carry out essential functions but one person to whom we are all especially indebted is our administrator.  I simply don’t know how the shul would run without her.  Thank you. 

If you are reading this report on the website, and decide to contact us, the administrator will probably be the first person you encounter.  See whether you agree with our chairman what a star she is.


Tzum gutn vert men bald gevoynt:
we soon get used to good things.
Extracts from Rabbi’s Report, AGM 5768

Leo Tolstoy opens his novel Anna Karenina with the sentence: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. What follows is a long and interesting novel about an unhappy family. Tolstoy understands what the Yiddish proverb knows: tzum gutn vert men bald gevoynt: we soon get used to good things.  Generally, and not just for novelists, things get so much more interesting when they are going wrong.

 

 

So I might be forgiven for saying that I hope you will find this report very dull. Indeed there are many good things I feel I can report, but if it is true that tzum gutn vert men bald gevoynt, we get used to good things, maybe that serves a useful purpose: it protects us at least potentially from complacency. We have often considered the, we hope, creative tension between continuity and change. We have also concerned ourselves with growth and development to guard against becoming set in our ways and withering on the vine.

What is sometimes harder to grasp, when we review our community, is what it takes to maintain the core level of activity, the daily realisation or putting into practice of Jewish values, which means that here in Bromley there is a synagogue and a centre of Jewish life and learning at all. Quite simply, we tend to be bald gevoynt: quickly used to the fact.

Looked at in the broad context of Jewish culture in today, the communal life of a synagogue cannot be at all taken for granted. The forces at work in society at large and in the lives of Jews who are part of that society are not notably conducive to the sort of communal association based on the generous giving of time and indeed money in the service of a religious and spiritual ideal: especially of an ideal which does not offer to tailor itself to each of our personal needs and preferences, but rather tends to require of us that we conform to its demands on us.

Every time I am in New York , it is brought home to me, as I am sure it is to most people, including people who are not Jewish, that there, in strong contrast to here, Jewishness, Judaism, Jewish culture and diversity are material constituents of the fabric of society as a whole. Moreover the broader context of Judaism, which is the presence of religion itself in society, receives public acknowledgement. High Holy Day services and also Christian Holyday services are published in the current events listings in the New York Times alongside exhibitions, theatre and cinema. By the same token, secularism can be, for a Jew, a Jewish secularism, so that the non-observant or unaffiliated there can still enjoy a strong sense of Jewish identity. Now the American way is not without its drawbacks and problems. But it does serve to highlight just how much more vulnerable our communal life is as British Jews, smaller in number and less culturally vocal as we are than our North American cousins.

It is said again and again that our population in the UK is declining, and while that is in fact a controversial statement, it is nevertheless incontrovertible that measured as affiliated members of Jewish communal life, synagogues, burial societies etc. the number of Jews in Britain is in decline.  These two elements, the population number and the communal organisation, specially the synagogues, are in some ways as chicken and egg. Just as we need numbers of Jews to make synagogues, so the synagogues, particularly here in the , make the Jews.

In the case of our own shul, we need to bear in mind that Bromley Reform Synagogue ‘makes’ Jews in South East London and North Kent . Just as Abraham is reported in the Torah as ‘making’ souls, so does our shul - and not at all exclusively in providing a rabbi and a community which, together, allow people to convert to Judaism.  Bromley Reform Synagogue makes the Jews who live in this part of the world Jewish, in the sense that it is the means by which Jewish values can be enacted communally, Torah can be studied communally, children can be taught, as is said in our shema, and people can take upon themselves the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, that is, accept the duties of our commandments. So much can be passed down in the home, but in our times Judaism in the home depends more and more on Judaism in the synagogue.

One of the most moving and instructive moments of the past year for me happened when I was called in to teach the Sunday afternoon GCSE class of young people. My brief was to discuss the role of the rabbi. In particular, I was being put in the firing line, as one of the very bright youngsters had told her regular teacher that she couldn’t see how it could be justifiable to pay a rabbi. Possibly the teacher felt the same, and couldn’t see how either, and so I was asked to take the class and answer the question. I’ve no idea how convincing I was, but it was what happened next that was important. For the last part of the session the chairman came to discuss with them how a synagogue was constituted and run, and what the role of the chair of the synagogue was.

In the discussion that followed I witnessed these young people realising with some wonder, I believe, that they would themselves one day be responsible for the existence of a synagogue. This fine building, the Religion school with its dedicated head teacher and the teachers she had found for them, the services which made their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs possible, the presence of other Jewish people beyond their own families in their lives, even the rabbi, all this community which was such a visible and concrete fact of their lives, was the result of absolutely nothing else than the continuing voluntary efforts and commitment of other Jewish people who had once been young people in a cheder themselves.

It is not surprising, though we may forget it, that our young people do not know that the synagogue is not a permanent institution such as the school they attend each week, the hospitals, fire stations, town halls and such they see around them.  This group of young people, themselves committed to study and from families committed to their Jewish upbringing, nevertheless had to come to realise that that is what a synagogue is.

The big question is, how many Jews are there around us and among us perhaps, who actually have not come to that realisation?  - that the synagogue is of their making. If generations after us do not make it anew, it will simply not be there. Indeed, if we do not make it year by year, it will vanish. If that is because we and our descendants have moved elsewhere and made our synagogue where we are, all well and good. But if it is because we have come to feel that the synagogue is not our responsibility, that it has an assured existence independent of us, then to return to the proverb, tzum gutn vert men bald gewoynt, we get used to the good thing, become complacent, and the good thing is no more. 

Like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the story of the past year has been a complex and an interesting one, but unlike his, it has also been, in the full sense of the word, a happy one. Moreover, for us the story is never over!

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